Summer 2024 Timetable

ENG100H1F - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 10 am-1 pm

Instructor(s): Jordan Howie

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

ENG100H1F - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 11 am-2 pm

Instructor(s): Nat Leduc

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

ENG100H1F - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 6-9 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Tracy O'Brien

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

ENG100H1S - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): Danyse Golick

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

ENG100H1S - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC0201

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 10 am-1 pm

Instructor(s): Connor Bennett

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

ENG100H1S - Effective Writing

Section Number: LEC5101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 6-9pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Dustin Meyer

Brief Description of Course: Practical tools for writing in university and beyond. Students will gain experience in generating ideas, clarifying insights, structuring arguments, composing paragraphs and sentences, critiquing and revising their writing, and communicating effectively to diverse audiences. This course may not be counted toward any English program.

ENG102H1F - Literature and the Sciences

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 4-6pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Thom Dancer

Brief Description of Course: Like science fiction? Argue with your friends about the depiction of future and fictional worlds and people? Want to learn how to talk with more sophistication about what you like and dislike about art, fiction, and film? Ever wonder what science ficiton novels, stories, and movies tell us about ourselves, our future as a species, the trajectory of technology? This class aims to develop a critical appreciation of popular science fiction, popular culture, and film from the perspective of literary analysis. Central to critical appreciation is the recognition of literature as carefully crafted art form, which basically means coming up with a cogent account of - what a piece of literature “means,” - what it is trying to do to/for the reader, - what technical, verbal, and structural choices the author has made and how they contribute to the overall experience of reading, and so on.

This course introduces students without a background in literary analysis or writing to basics of analysis, interpretation, and study of literature. It is a course that emphasizes the development of reading and thinking and communication skills.

Required Reading: The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin; Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer; Stories by Ursual Le Guin, Geoffrey Landis, Cixin Liu; Movies: Rogue One, Mad Max: Fury Road, Television Episodes from Futurama and Doctor Who.

First Three Authors and Texts: Liu, Le Guin, Landis

Method of Evaluation: Group Work, Quizzes, Test, Essays.

ENG110Y1 - Narrative

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 10 am-1 pm

Instructor(s): Michael Johnstone

Brief Description of Course: This course explores the stories that are all around us and that shape our world: traditional literary narratives such as ballads, romances, and novels, and also non-literary forms of narrative, such as journalism, movies, myths, jokes, legal judgments, travel writing, histories, songs, diaries, biographies.

Required Reading: TBA 

Method of Evaluation: TBA

ENG202H1F - Introduction to British Literature I

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 1-4 pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course: A survey of English literature, from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through Milton in the late seventeenth century, emphasizing major authors, movements and periods, and formal analysis. Central themes will include the relationship between the ancient heroic code and Christian values; the movement from a providential to a modern scientific cosmology; the many forms of love, both sacred and secular; community, individualism, and alienation in the transition to modernity; and sin, shame, and forgiveness. We will employ a variety of approaches to literary analysis, including historicism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, and modes of political and affective reading.  

Required Reading:  Norton Anthology of English Literature, vols. A&B and Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms  

First Three Authors and Texts: Dream of the Rood; Beowulf; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 

Method of Evaluation: short paper; formal analysis; term tests; participation. 

ENG203H1S - Introduction to British Literature II

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 10 am-1 pm

Instructor(s):  Alexander Thomas

Brief Description of Course: This course offers an introduction to core aesthetic, thematic, and formal features of British literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century through the writings of both canonical and lesser-known authors, with an attentiveness to the diversity of literary voices within the period.  Highlights of the wide range of poetry, prose, and drama covered over the term include Christopher Smart’s ecstatic hymn to his beloved cat in Jubilate Agno, an eerie tale from the casebook of William Hope Hodgeson’s two-fisted psychic detective, Carnacki the Ghost Finder, and Hanif Kureshi’s comic novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which chronicles a young Anglo-Indian’s queer coming-of-age in 1970s London. Throughout this course, we will be investigating how literary genres and forms expand or limit our ways of imagining the self, gender, sexuality, politics, ecology, and the very nature of reality.  

Required Reading: TBA; includes selections from Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Christopher Smart, William Blake, S.T Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Robert Wedderburn,George Elliot, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgeson, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Hanif Kureshi 

First Three Authors and Texts: Daniel Defoe “The Apparition of Mrs.Veal,” Jonathan Swift “My Ladies’ Dressing Room,” Lady Mary Wortley Montague “On the Reasons that Induced Dr.S to Write a Poem Call’d The Ladies’ Dressing Room”  

Method of Evaluation: short essay, longer essay, quizzes, participation, final exam

ENG215H1F - The Canadian Short Story

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 10 am- 1 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Sarah Caskey

Brief Description of Course: The short story is a demanding and exhilarating art form. As the Canadian literary critic W. H. New observes, it “calls upon its readers to perceive the breadth of vision that is condensed into a small compass.” Canadian writers have made outstanding contributions to the genre and this course examines Canadian short fiction written in English since the beginning of the twentieth century to the present.  The short stories selected for analysis reflect a variety of authors, as well as diverse periods, regions, literary styles, thematic interests, and experimentation within the genre.  Together, the stories attest to the vitality of the genre in this country and the important role Canadians writers have played in shaping the form. 

We will focus on reading individual stories closely, with attention to form and structure, and to relating seemingly disparate stories to one another, synthesizing ideas that connect them into a larger short-story literary tradition.  Teaching the stories close to chronological order means we can grasp much of the history of literary influence and the growth and development of the genre in Canada within the boundaries of the syllabus. Throughout the term, we will explore the place of the short story in Canadian literary culture and its exciting intersection with issues including storytelling and art.  

Required Reading: Course readings will be available on the Library Reading List through Quercus.

First Three Authors and Texts: Michael Crummey, Harry Robinson, Thomas King. 

Method of Evaluation: Passage Analysis (25%); Essay (40%); Final Assignment (25%); Participation (10%).  

ENG220H1F - Introduction to Shakespeare

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 10 am - 1 pm

Instructor(s): Philippa Sheppard

Brief Description of Course: More than any other author, Shakespeare’s works have shaped our language and our arts, the way we think and see ourselves. He is performed in every language and culture, been adapted to every medium. This course will explore six of Shakespeare’s plays, arranged chronologically and within genre. With reference to performances caught on film, and founded on historical background, we will discuss the dramatization of theme, character, structure, setting and language. We will endeavour to keep in mind the exigencies of the theatre in Shakespeare’s time and in our own. Shakespeare was, after all, a consummate man of the theatre. His plays are blueprints for shows on stage. We will remain open to the plethora of meanings and interpretations suggested by these blueprints in all their infinite variety.

Required Reading: Henry IV Part 1, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear.

First Three Authors and Texts: Henry IV Part 1, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night

Method of Evaluation: One in-class essay (20%); one take-home essay (35%); one three-hour exam (35%); participation (10%). I will take attendance each class, and make note of oral contributions, to arrive at the participation mark. Attendance is important. Handing in an outline for the take-home essay is mandatory, and receives a 2 mark bonus on the essay if properly executed. Extensions/Make-up tests only provided for illness or bereavement (with appropriate documentation submitted). Essays should be submitted online.

ENG237H1F - Science Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 10 am - 1 pm

Instructor(s): Stanka Radovic

Brief Description of Course: Contemporary science/speculative/dystopian fiction re-imagines our social landscapes. Our course will explore how this genre offers alternative perspectives on the existing social order, envisions the consequences of environmental degradation, revises the norms of individual and communal identity, and re-conceptualizes categories of race and gender. Challenging readers’ expectations about the meaning of history, community, and identity, the assigned texts propose radically different, yet strangely familiar, visions of our world. What alternative social environments will we find in these readings and how will they affect our relationship to the world we actually live in? 

Required Reading: Fredric Brown “Knock”; Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide Through the Galaxy; Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; Martin L. Shoemaker “Today I am Paul”; J. G. Ballard “The Subliminal Man”; Ursula Le Guin “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”; Octavia Butler Kindred; Omar El Akkad “Factory Air”; Helen Phillips “The Disaster Store” 

First Three Authors and Texts: Fredric Brown “Knock”; Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide Through the Galaxy; Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 

Method of Evaluation: Class participation (15%), Assignment 1 (25%), Assignment 2 (25%), Assignment 3 (35%) 

ENG250H1F - Introduction to American Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 2- 5 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Brief Description of Course: This course will introduce students to American literature using a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, and slave narratives, by a number of writers seen as key figures in the American canon, but also some who are less well-known, and we will examine how their works reflect national and individual concerns with freedom and identity, particularly in relation to race, gender and sexuality.  

Required Reading: We will be using the shorter 10th edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2 vols, published July 2022), with works by writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Jewett, Bierce, Gilman, James, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara, Olds, Morrison, and Lahiri. 

First Three Authors and Texts: Irving, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville

Method of Evaluation: Take-home Mid-term Test (20%); Essay (35%); Participation (15%); Take-home Exam (30%) 

ENG252H1S - Introduction to Canadian Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 1-4pm

Instructor(s): Kelly Baron

Brief Description of Course: This course offers an introduction to landmark works of Canadian poetry and prose, ranging from 1900 to the present day. Approaches will consider the critical historical, political, social, and formal issues that these literary works raise. Through these approaches, we will consider the anxiety behind developing a national canon of Canadian literature. Questions that we will consider include the following: what are the main developments in Canadian literature? What image(s) of Canada is reflected in our literature? How does literature help create a national identity? Is it possible to have a singular national identity in a multicultural country like Canada, i.e., a homogenizing CanLit, or does our literature reflect many different CanLits?

Required Reading: 

An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English 4th Edition, edited by Russell Brown and Donna Bennett (2019).  

Additional readings will be either be freely available online or PDFs will be posted to Quercus: 

• The Canadian Multiculturalism Act, available via PDF on Quercus 
• Darcy Ballantyne, Paul Barrett, Camille Isaacs, Kris Singh, “The Unbearable Whiteness of CanLit, available online on The Walrus
• Kai Cheng Thom, “Love Letters to Lost Souls,” available online at The Ex-Puritan
• Austin Clarke, “Introduction” and “Canadian Experience” from Nine Men Who Laughed (Penguin 1986, pp. 1-7, 31-51), available via PDF on Quercus 
• Lee Maracle, “Two Poems,” available online at The Ex-Puritan
• Souvankham Thammavongsa, “Mani Pedi,” available online at The Ex-Puritan

First Three Authors and Texts: Sara Jeannette Duncan, E. Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock

Method of Evaluation: Close Reading Essay (25%); Comparative Essay (30%); In-Class Final Exam (30%), Participation (15%) 

ENG270H1S - Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 11 am-2 pm

Instructor(s): Arka Chakraborty

Brief Description of Course: What is Colonial Writing? What is Postcolonial Writing? How do they matter in our worlds? In this course, we will examine these two kinds of writing to realize that one is impossible to understand without the other, and that both are shaped by, and continue to shape, the world we live in. This introductory course will begin with fundamental texts of the 20th and 21st century that grapple with the fallout of European colonialisms. Using these, we shall examine a selection of literary works—poems, short fiction, and excerpts from long fiction and drama—from formerly colonized parts of the world. We will see with a broad view—from visions that are traumatized, defiant, and hopeful—the knowledges, interpretations, effects, and continuities of extractive European expansionism on the world, yesterday and today.

Required Reading: “Go, Get Education”; selections and excerpts from: Coolie, Une si longue lettre [So Long a Letter], This Wound is a World, The Other Side of Silence, Beyond a Boundary, The Inconvenient Indian, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Zong!, Citizen: An American Lyric, A Dance of the Forests, Decolonizing the Mind, This Place: 150 Years Retold, Une têmpete [A Tempest]

First Three Authors and Texts: Colonialism/Postcolonialism; The Inconvenient Indian; Black Skin/White Masks

Method of Evaluation: Take-home quizzes and optional quizzes, discussion posts, final essay, participation

ENG311H1S - Medieval Literature

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 2-5pm

Instructor(s): Carroll Balot

Brief Description of Course: an introduction to non-Chaucerian medieval literature for advanced undergraduates, with an emphasis on close reading. Our goal will be to formulate and enact a reading practice for each work that grows out of the unique demands of the text itself, considering the way these works have particular visions of the world and our place in it. Moving from the sixth to the 15th centuries, our themes and topics will include British history, chivalry, and nostalgia; imagining death and rebirth; Christian social criticism; and the sanctification of women’s experience. 

Required Reading: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol.1: The Medieval Period and Pearl (Broadview). The books are available as a package in the university bookstore. 

First Three Authors and Texts: Gildas, selection from The Ruin of Britain; Bede, selection from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.; The Wanderer; The Wife’s Lament, and The Ruin. 

Method of Evaluation: Short responses; 5-6 page essay; term tests; participation.

ENG323H1F - Austen & Contemporaries

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 10 am-1 pm

Instructor(s): Alex Hernandez

Brief Description of Course: On a stone slab tucked away in Winchester’s cathedral church, Jane Austen’s grave notes that: “the extraordinary endowments of her mind / obtained the regard of all who knew her and / the warmest love of her intimate connections.” A metaphor for the relative obscurity in which she lived her life, the memorial speaks volumes even as it makes no mention of her writing. This course explores that extraordinary mind, placing Austen in the context of her times in several senses. We’ll look to situate her work in a dialogue with that of contemporaries in literature, philosophy, and aesthetics, to read closely as she traces the complex family dynamics of the late Georgian home, and to understand her work as part of a moment of global political upheaval with profound consequences even to this day. To do so, we’ll read a number of her novels, for the most part moving chronologically, making the occasional detour into the work of fellow authors or secondary critical accounts. Students will learn to read her work more critically and develop some facility with the era’s literature, as well as gain an understanding of some of the classic accounts through which scholars have understood this period.

Required Reading: Several—but not too many—of Austen’s novels (Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Persuasion), a number of relatively short supplemental works for context, including some poetry and critical works

First Three Authors and Texts: Northanger Abbey, along with some contextualizing material on the gothic

Method of Evaluation: Engaged Participation, an Essay, Term Tests

ENG355H1F - Drama 1603-1642

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 4-7pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Katherine Williams

Brief Description of Course: This course explores English drama from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the closing of the theatres, with attention to such playwrights as Jonson, Middleton, Shakespeare, Webster.

Required Reading: TBA 

Method of Evaluation: TBA

ENG357H1F - New Writing in Canada

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 1-4pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Vikki Visvis

Brief Description of Course: A study of fiction published in Canada in the twenty-first century by emerging writers. Focusing on both the novel and the short story collection, we will consider how contemporary fiction in Canada moves in new directions in its treatment of genre and in its reconceptualization of canonical preoccupations. We will begin with an analysis of speculative fiction, both Indigenous “wonderworks” and Afrofuturism, to explore the traumas of settler-colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, cross-cultural solidarity, and environmental sustainability. We will continue with a critique of the Canadian wilderness to examine how women, madness, and criminality complicate gendered constructions of the North and the adventure narrative. The course will close with a discussion of postmodernism in Canada, specifically its evolving relationship with God, humanism, and history.

Required Reading: Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (DCB); Wayde Compton, The Outer Harbour (Arsenal); Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air (McClelland&Stewart); Gil Adamson, The Outlander (Anansi); Yann Martel, The Life of Pi (Vintage); Chester Brown, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (Drawn&Quarterly).

Fiction available at the University of Toronto Bookstore (214 College Street, 416-640-7900).

First Three Authors and Texts: Dimaline, Compton, Hay

Method of Evaluation: Take-home test (25%); Essay—8 pages (40%); Final exam—2 hours (25%); Participation (10%).

ENG365H1S - Contemporary American Fiction

Section Number: LEC0101

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 2-5pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Scott Rayter

Brief Description of Course: How do contemporary American fiction writers deal with the politics of representation in their works, particularly in relation to identity—be it national, sexual, gender, ethnic, or racial—and within a larger postmodern context of questioning subjectivity itself? 

Required Reading: Works will include only recent 21st-century novels and short stories by writers such as George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Colson Whitehead, Ha Jin, Nathan Englander, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Tommy Orange.

First Three Authors and Texts: Machado, Saunders, Moore

Method of Evaluation: Take-home Passage Analysis (20%); Essay (35%); Take-home Exam (30%); Participation (15%)

ENG371H1S - Topics in Indigenous, Postcolonial, Transnational Literatures: Alternative Sovereignties Across Black and Indigenous Literatures

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 12-3 pm

Instructor(s): Maandeeq Mohamed

Brief Description of Course: This course places contemporary Black and Indigenous literatures in conversation, to explore how differing understandings of sovereignty in these texts critique and revise settler geographies. We begin with a reading of Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus– there, Simpson notes that the settler state’s “ongoing and structural project to acquire and maintain land, and to eliminate those on it, did not work completely. There are still: Indigenous peoples…They will persist, robustly” (12). Taking this robust persistence of Indigenous ways of being as a starting point, the course examines ambivalent orientations towards the nation-state in contemporary poetry, novels, short stories and theory across Turtle Island. By attending to the shared political and aesthetic concerns found in critiques of colonial modernity in Black and Indigenous literatures, this course will think across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, so that Indigenous and Black study might touch. 

Required Reading: Audra Simpson, Tiffany King, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Dionne Brand, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Toni Morrison, Eve Tuck, Afua Cooper, M. NourbeSe Philip

Method of Evaluation: participation (10%); two short passage analyses (40%); essay abstract (15%); essay (35%) 

ENG376H1F - Topics in Theory, Language, Critical Methods: Narrative Theory

Section Number: 

Time(s): Monday, Wednesday 10 am - 1 pm

Instructor(s): Daniel Newman

Brief Description of Course: What is narrative? How does it work? How do the elements of a narrative combine to affect readers aesthetically, emotionally, ideologically? These are some of the questions asked by narrative theory (or narratology). More specifically, it asks questions like, “How and why are the events in this story arranged in this particular order?” and “How do narrators control the flow of knowledge and information?” Narratology thus provides a useful framework for students interested in reading, analyzing or even writing narrative literature (including fiction, narrative nonfiction, film, comics, drama and even some poetry and music). It also works very nicely with other critical or theoretical approaches to literature: some of the great works of feminist and Marxist literary theory, for example, simultaneously use and contribute to narratology. 

This course covers the building blocks of narrative and some of its key techniques, focusing on character, event, plot, narration (including unreliable and weird narrators), time (including impossible temporalities) and more. Our theory focus will always be grounded in real texts, all of them short: short stories and nonfiction narratives, journalism, film, comics, music videos, and many other media. You're encouraged to suggest additional short narratives that strike them as interesting from a technical/formal perspective. 

Required Reading: The reading (and viewing) list will be composed of several short texts, most of them short stories (but also journalism, nonfiction, film, comics, music videos and other media). All readings and videos on the syllabus are available free online, either through the University of Toronto libraries (UTL) or elsewhere. 

The exact texts will be announced before the course begins, but they will include mainly modern and contemporary works by authors and directors including Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Ted Chiang, Teju Cole, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas King, David Lynch, Sarah Polley, Namwali Serpell, Bill Watterson and many more. 

First Three Authors and Texts: Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”; Raymond Carver, “So Much Water So Close to Home”; the Brothers Grimm, “Rapunzel”

Method of Evaluation: Method of Evaluation: Three Short Textual Analyses + One Creative-Analytical Assignment (60%, based on top three of four grades); Take-Home Test (25%); Participation (15%) 

ENG480H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: African American Humour

Section Number: L5101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 6-8 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Jasleen Singh

Brief Description of Course: This seminar reflects on the vital role that Black American humorists and stand-up comedians occupy in American literature, film, and popular culture. Our primary texts will include literary works by Hilton Als, Paul Beatty, and Fran Ross—as well as TV/film (Atlanta and Friday), music (Biz Markie and De La Soul), and stand-up comedy (from Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Wanda Sykes, among others). Seminar discussions will be grounded in African American literary criticism and history, which addresses issues including the appropriation of voice, Black feminist methodology, Black literary movements like the Harlem Renaissance and the Post-Soul aesthetic, resistance during/following the civil rights and Black Power movements, and hybridity. In our assignments, we will engage with sources that are not traditionally considered ‘scholarly’ or critical ‘secondary’ material, inviting us to rethink how we define a ‘text.’ Students will emerge from this seminar with a heightened awareness of their ability to closely read and think critically about the representations of ‘race’ and Blackness in the music, film, comedy, and social media content/memes that they encounter outside the classroom. 

Required Reading: TBA 

First Three Authors and Texts: TBA

Method of Evaluation: TBA

ENG481H1S - Advanced Studies Seminar: Canadian Speculative Fiction

Section Number: L0101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 2- 4 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Vikki Visvis

Brief Description of Course: If speculation beyond the directly observable natural world is the hallmark of speculative fiction, then, the emphasis on realism in historical surveys of Canadian fiction means the elision of genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. However, Canadian literature betrays a marked commitment to speculative fiction, from Margaret Atwood’s now archetypal feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale to the inception of cyberpunk with William Gibson’s Neuromancer. This course will specifically examine how works of Canadian speculative fiction respond to three timely issues: American socio-politics, Canadian settler-colonialism, and experiential displacement. We will begin by appraising how Canadian futuristic dystopian narratives offer critiques of and convey anxieties about the socio-political dynamics of their US neighbours, whether in terms of misogyny, reproductive rights, religious extremism, totalitarianism, terrorism, biological warfare, a second American Civil War, and climate change. We will continue by evaluating how Indigenous “wonderworks,” Indigiqueer speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism not only uncover Canada’s own problematic history of residential schooling, two-spirit discrimination, anti-Black racism, and ghettoization but also celebrate the power of cultural resurgence to combat settler-colonial legacies. The course will close by considering how post-apocalyptic pandemic settings and the genre of cyberpunk display the dynamics of displacement and alienation, be it as a stateless refugee or as post-human. Ultimately, by investigating the ways Canadian speculative fiction responds to American socio-politics, marginalized cultures, and conditions of displacement, this course exposes how fantastic worlds are far from escapist avoidance; they are, in fact, vehicles for new forms of critical engagement that educate us about our immediate reality and enable us to navigate our future. 

Required Reading: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Omar El Akkad, American War; Cherie Dimaline The Marrow Thieves; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring; Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven; William Gibson, Neuromancer; short stories by Adam Garnet Jones, Kai Minosh Pyle, Mari Kurisato, and Nazbah Tom from Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, Ed. Joshua Whitehead.  

First Three Authors and Texts: Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Cherie Dimaline

Method of Evaluation: Five short response assignments (1-2 pages each) 15%; Participation 10%; Seminar presentation (15 minutes) 20%; Essay proposal and annotated bibliography 20%; Final long essay (15-18 pages) 35%. 

ENG485H1F - Advanced Studies Seminar: Staging Islam in Early modern England

Section Number: L5101

Time(s): Tuesday, Thursday 4-6 pm ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Instructor(s): Katherine Williams

Brief Description of Course: TBA

Required Reading: TBA 

First Three Authors and Texts: TBA

Method of Evaluation: TBA